A visit to The Modern Institute to discuss the work of artists, Sue Tompkins and William E. Jones.
Sue Tompkins will show a series of typed text constructions on paper, chiffon fabric works and performed Hallo Welcome to Keith Street. Tompkins’ performances have been described as strung-out exercises in associative free thought: performance poetry that moves from the page to the voice, from speech to song, from song to signal, from signal to pure sound.
All Tompkins’ works contain repeated and ritualistic, patterns and actions – undertaken alone when she is in her studio; they can be traced in her text and fabric works, and are then accentuated in her live performances which hint at transcendence between worlds and times.
Also on show is new work by Los Angeles-based artists and filmmaker, William E. Jones. Known as a filmmaker, this is Jones first exhibition of works predominantly on paper. Having made 16mm experimental films always screened in cinema contexts, this new body of work required digital production techniques to realise it.
The new series of photographs and film were made in Ohio, the state where Jones grew up. Returning after twenty years, he discovered that the industrial landscape, which had started to decay in the 1970s, had changed little since he left in the 1980s. Staying in his family’s house, he looked at the books he had left behind, including the art encyclopaedia which had informed his desire to be an artist. The new works connect photographs of ruined buildings with skeletal pages of art books, with the paintings and drawings excised. Jones’s experience traverses pivotal points in the economic and geographic shifts in American society, and these experiences are reflected in these works.
